The Lazarus Rumba Read Online Free

entertained the sisters with wicked tales of demons and witches that lived among them. As time passed, Teodoro grew bolder and he would wander into town hand in hand with la Blanquita, flanked by his two daughters, and to those he ran into, at the barbershop, in the gardens of Parque Martí, at the movie theater, on the front steps of the yellow church, he would remain the gentleman he always was and lower his head and lift his Panama and greet with a simple “Pues buenas,” and move on.
    On Tuesday afternoons doña Adela had no husband, and for many years she let that be, taking her longest siestas on that day, and warning the servants, on pain of dismissal, that no one, for no reason, should raise his voice above a whisper, and much less disturb her, till her husband returned with her daughter from the beach, where they went each Tuesday afternoon. Only once was her long Tuesday siesta interrupted, and once proved enough. A young indian girl, the daughter of one of the cooks, had snuck into the kitchen and, playing with the butcher knives, had sliced her hand open betwixt thumb and index finger and at the sight of her gushing blood began to wail, and neither her father nor the other servants, with cupped hands over her mouth and whispery consolations into her ears and kitchen rags around her hand, could get her to stop. Doña Adela appeared at the kitchen doorway, a long leather belt at her side, like a whip. The cook stepped away from his whimpering daughter as doña Adela approached, and he did nothing as he watched his employer beat his injured child with such venom that the rags came loose from her wounded hand and spread her blood in splashes all over, on the yellow walls, on the refrigerator doors, on the shiny countertops, on her father’s apron, and on the dress and face of the woman who was so mercilessly administering uncounted lashes on his daughter’s legs. When the beating was done, doña Adela, gasping for air, the drops of blood commingling with the sweat on her brow, told her cook that there was no need to worry, that he still had his job, and that he should get his poor daughter to a hospital. When Teodoro came home that evening, he diligently washed every drop of blood from the kitchen, and that night did not sleep, re-covering the stained walls with a shiny coat of yellow. He never asked what had happened, and when the old cook tried to relate to him the story, he silenced him, assuring him that his gentle wife had never once laid a violent hand on her own daughter, much less on anybody else’s daughter. And from then on, on the cook’s daughter’s birthday, year after year, Teodoro secretly gave her gifts as lavish and extravagant as the ones he gave Alicia on her own birthday.
    With no other option, seemingly satisfied, the cook behaved as if the bright yellow walls had never been stained with his daughter’s blood, and doña Adela was never again disturbed from her long Tuesday siesta, her patience long as Penelope’s, till the day she approached Father Gonzalo and put her lips to his ears and asked him, befuddled as a three-year-old: “What kind of a God takes a man from his wife and lets him die in the bed of his whore?”
    God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo.
    When?
    When He sees fit, when His servant is least in the mood for answers, most caught in the horridness of domesticity—in those crusty-eyed moments between dreams and the morning rays filtering through the mosquitero—there God is, too clever to come in dreams (that is only the stuff of stories), where his servant may defend himself with all the skill and wile of the beastly unconscious—for how often is He called to ease suffering, and He comes instead to prove that gouty joints are a mere inconvenience, a heresy, an affront to His imagination to say: “I am now at the worst. I am replete with morbid humors.” For whosoever can mouth those words, the